Per processor licenses for your application

Some vendors license their application per processor, also in a virtualized environment. So if your VM has 4 vCPU’s your vendor will want you to buy a 4 processor license for the application. But you can avoid this by telling the VM that it has cores instead of processors. In others words, instead of having 4 processors you would have 1 processor with 4 cores:

Power off the VM

Right click on the VM and select “Edit Settings…”

Select the “Options” tab

Click on “General” (in the “Advanced” options section)

Click “Configuration Parameters…” (in the pane on the right)

Click “Add Row”

Enter “cpuid.coresPerSocket” in the “Name” column

Enter a value (try 2, 4, or in the “Value” column

Click “OK”

Power on the VM

The VM will now appear to the OS as having multi-core CPUs with the number of cores per CPU given by the value that you selected. For example, if you create an 8 VCPU VM and set “cpuid.coresPerSocket = 2″ it will be recognized as 4 dual-core CPU’s by the OS while it’s actually utilizing 8 physical cores.